A Buffalo Nation

A Bison Bull on Standing Rock — Buffalo, as most people there call them.

Travis ‘Good Bull Man’ Condon and I harvested this bull along the Grand River, on Ron Brownotter’s ranch, the country’s largest native-owned bison operation. What I’d thought would be a simple, fenced, farm-style harvest quickly became a half-day search for a herd of several hundred animals freely roaming the 31 square miles of his rolling-hill prairie ranch land. It felt like we’d gone 500 years back in time.


Travis is Dakota, descended from survivors of the Whitestone Hill Massacre of 1863, and in addition to harvesting, field dressing, and butchering this bull with us, offered a cultural immersion to my wife Avani and I, and our team — a story we tell in episode #102 of The WildFed Podcast and will be featured in Season 2 of WildFed on Outdoor Channel.


Perhaps most refreshing was being amongst a culture that can both view this animal spiritually yet at the same time doesn’t wrestle with killing them for food. While my own culture wrestles with the ethics of killing animals and eating meat, the Dakota — at least the folks I met — seem perfectly at peace with this. 


In what Travis calls “The Buffalo Days”, when mounted Sioux hunters pursued bison on the open prairie, the butchering of these animals was handled by women. Their work is remembered as being precise and efficient, in contrast to our fumblings, which took hours and were fraught with unnecessary, injury-inducing pushing, pulling, yanking, and tearing. We joked a lot about these women looking down, laughing as they watched two men stumble their way through the butchering process — a workload I vastly underestimated.


Though we gifted half of this animal to Travis, to the many hands that helped us, to our team, and to friends, we still had to buy another freezer. We’ve been joyfully eating bison every day since!

Wóphila! We are grateful beyond measure!